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Compared to a lot of the game’s fans, I only got into Football Manager fairly recently. I picked up FM18 on sale while I should have been revising for exams in my second year of uni, and it would be fair to say that I was immediately hooked. I’ve played every new instalment since then and ploughed a frankly upsetting number of hours into the series. In my FM24 save, I’ve taken Swedish fourth-division side Huddinge IF to Allsvenskan dominance while only ever signing Swedish players. I like these games quite a lot.
Like most other fans of the series, I’ve been looking forward to FM25 since before FM24 was released thanks to all the shiny new features we’ve been promised. The switch to the Unity engine and the long-awaited graphical update are my main focus, but I am also very excited about the addition of the women’s game, too. So when the news hit my retinas that the first FM25 trailer had finally dropped, I couldn’t wait to see all those new features in action for the first time, and like seemingly the rest of the world, was desperately disappointed to see absolutely nothing.
If you’ve not seen the trailer yet, you’re not missing out on much. It’s around a minute of footage of people looking at nondescript screenshots of Football Manager on their monitors and phones before a promotional image showing the release date – exciting stuff, right? At the time of writing, the trailer has a paltry 1.8 thousand likes on YouTube, compared to a whopping 4.2 thousand dislikes. In fairness to developer Sports Interactive, there is a short roadmap shown at the end of the trailer telling us that we’ll find out more about various new features over the next few weeks, though it only shows the date for the women’s football deep dive, while the others are ‘To Be Announced’, which isn’t particularly helpful.
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Now, before I go any further, I want to clarify that I think the Football Manager developers are incredible. Time and again, content creators are quick to confirm how dedicated they are to the game, and how every one of them is as much a fan of the series as we are and are working tirelessly to make FM as good as it can be. My quarrel is not with them, it’s with this rollout.
Gaming is full of unscrupulous developers, and SI is one of the few developers that I trust to do well by its players, but not everyone is like that, and SI’s seeming reluctance to show us any actual gameplay from this year’s iteration has turned what should have been an exciting time for players into a shambles of rumours and speculation.
When a game makes a significant change to its formula, like swapping to a new engine, you would expect it to be front and centre of the game’s marketing. FM players have been begging for better graphics for years, and if that’s what SI is delivering with FM25, then why haven’t they shown them? By this time in years gone by, we’d know when the customary FM beta period would begin for players who have pre-ordered the game – this year, we don’t even know if there is one. Combine that with the fact that FM25 has already been delayed by several weeks, releasing in late November instead of its original early November. At best, it’s clumsy and at worst, well, it doesn’t exactly inspire much hope.
FM25 has been billed as the beginning of a new era for Football Manager, but with the only aspects of the game we’ve seen so far being a new logo and a couple of screenshots of the UI, the main takeaway for many players seems to be that FM has betrayed its core fanbase to try and court more console players. As if that wasn’t bad enough, with almost no information about the game being released so far, players have already been encouraged to pre-order the game, with posts on the game’s subreddit filled with hundreds of players already pledging not to. I’m no marketing whiz, but I can’t imagine this is the reaction SI was hoping for when they dropped their announcement trailer earlier this week.
I still believe in SI, and I believe in FM25, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that this rollout has been shambolic. If I’m pre-ordering a game, I want to know exactly what I’m getting, whether that’s new features or tweaks to the formula. I don’t want to be shown a couple of clips of people sitting at their desks before being asked to drop upwards of £40 on the quality of a few screenshots. Whatever plan SI had before, it’s clear to see that it is not working, and the very least that a dedicated fanbase who buy their game year in, year out deserves is to be told what they’re buying. Sports Interactive is undoubtedly correct that FM25 will mark the beginning of a new era for the series. Whether this new era changes the game for the better still remains to be seen.